White House Tries to Prevent Judge From Ruling on Surveillance Efforts

[Ichingcarpenter]

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration moved late Friday to prevent a federal judge in California from ruling on the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance programs authorized during the Bush administration, telling a court that recent disclosures about National Security Agency spying were not enough to undermine its claim that litigating the case would jeopardize state secrets.

In a set of filings in the two long-running cases in the Northern District of California, the government acknowledged for the first time that the N.S.A. started systematically collecting data about Americans’ emails and phone calls in 2001, alongside its program of wiretapping certain calls without warrants. The government had long argued that disclosure of these and other secrets would put the country at risk if they came out in court.

But the government said that despite recent leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, that made public a fuller scope of the surveillance and data collection programs put in place after the Sept. 11 attacks, sensitive secrets remained at risk in any courtroom discussion of their details — like whether the plaintiffs were targets of intelligence collection or whether particular telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon had helped the agency.

“Disclosure of this still-classified information regarding the scope and operational details of N.S.A. intelligence activities implicated by plaintiffs’ allegations could be expected to cause extremely grave damage to the national security of the United States,” wrote the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/us/white-house-tries-to-prevent-judge-from-ruling-on-surveillance-efforts.html?_r=0


Anyone feel that Clapper is gonna get a primo job with Boz Allen or other related corptocracy after his 'retirement'' from the NSA?

[GetRidOfThem]

1. I just read this article while having breakfast....

...and immidiately logged into DU. I usually do this when I am pissed. This posting above, by the way, is not the entire article.

I am pissed!.... And I really wish Obambi had more of a spine... (I hated the part where they were saying that he is trying to "split the differences" between the two opposing factions in his own administration, though this part of the article is not quoted above)

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. 4 paragraphs are allowed from aricles

due to copy write and DU rules

[solarhydrocan]

3. No more secrecy!

Obama: Transparency Will Be Touchstone

Fascinating, this.

[RC]

4. Translation: Exposure means, I could lose my job and even go to prison.

Disclosure of this still-classified information regarding the scope and operational details of N.S.A. intelligence activities implicated by plaintiffs’ allegations could be expected to cause extremely grave damage to the national security of the United States,” wrote the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. NYT..EDITORIAL Mr. Obama’s Disappointing Response

By the time President Obama gave his news conference on Friday, there was really only one course to take on surveillance policy from an ethical, moral, constitutional and even political point of view. And that was to embrace the recommendations of his handpicked panel on government spying — and bills pending in Congress — to end the obvious excesses. He could have started by suspending the constitutionally questionable (and evidently pointless) collection of data on every phone call and email that Americans make.


He did not do any of that.

Sure, Mr. Obama thanked his panel for making 46 recommendations to restore the rule of law and constitutional principles to government surveillance activities. (The number alone casts a bad light on the president’s repeated claims that there really was nothing wrong with surveillance policy.) And he promised to review those ideas and let us know next month which, if any, he intends to follow.

But Mr. Obama has had plenty of time to consider this issue, and the only specific thing he said on the panel’s proposals was that it might be a good idea to let communications companies keep the data on phone calls and emails rather than store them in the vast government databases that could be easily abused. But he raised doubts about such a plan, and he left the impression that he sees this issue as basically a question of public relations and public perception.


more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/opinion/mr-obamas-disappointing-response.html

[RC]

7. Well, so much for the Constitutional Scholar.

[Harmony Blue]

6. As this takes its course more mistakes are being made

when simple honesty and integrity would make most of this go away.